


Something soft and soaked in pain

by KrasneTigritsa



Category: Ghost Story (The Dresden Files), Ghost Story - Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Fitz thinks he’s irredeemable, Gen, Ghost Story was such a lovely story and Fitz deserved an ending so here we are, Guilt, Harry thinks he’s dead, Hurt/Comfort, I hope I got Mrs. Carpenter’s name right, Missing Scene, No editing we post our first drafts like men, Oneshot, Possibly Not Canon Compliant, Spoilers for Ghost Story, big news they’re both wrong, but I know nothing about anything outside this book so, please correct me if I’m wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 05:11:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15656436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrasneTigritsa/pseuds/KrasneTigritsa
Summary: Fitz is safe for the first time in years, with a roof over his head and a promise of food with no strings attached, but he knows he doesn’t deserve any of it.Harry Dresden is no stranger to guilt or regret, but he also didn’t spend valuable moonlight haunting this kid for nothing.





	Something soft and soaked in pain

**Author's Note:**

> Ghost Story was SO GOOD. I’ve read literally nothing else in the series, though, so I’m sorry if this isn’t totally accurate—I just really like Fitz, and felt like his arc was never really resolved in the book, so. This happened. 
> 
> Title from ‘The Judge’ by Twenty One Pilots.

 

In spite of what Mrs. Carpenter might think, it wasn’t too cold to be outside without his jacket. Fitz shrugged his shoulders against the night air—chilly, sure, but alive with the beginnings of a months-late spring thaw. He’d tried to tell the lady that he’d been out in worse, but that excuse hadn’t flown.

“How much coldyou can survive isn’t the point. You don’t have to be cold anymore, that’s the point,” She’d insisted, shoving a coat at him. It was brown, made of harsh canvas worn down by some past wearer. He’d left it tucked aside by the bed when he’d snuck out the window and onto the roof.

A breeze blew sharply over the peak of the roof, carrying the cold of the half-melted snow along with it, and Fitz did not wish he’d brought the jacket outside with him. He didn’t.

He did wish he’d snagged a little of the wizard’s stash of whiskey before they’d left the warehouse. He never liked the taste of it, but the drifting warmth it left buzzing in his chest was well worth the bitterness.

He picked at the scrapes on his hands absently instead.

“Hey, kid.”

The disembodied voice made him jump, and the jump made him realize that he was sitting on a sloped surface over a two-story drop. It took a second to get his breath back.

“Thought you were gone for good.” He said, because talking to the ghosts of dead wizards was something that was normal, now. For some reason. His heart wasn’t quieting down like it should, and he stabbed a fingernail into a scab until the blood was slick on his fingers. Didn’t blood do something to ghosts? Make them...hungry, or something? He could have sworn he’d seen a movie about that once.

“Just about. I bargained for one last little encore.”

Dresden didn’t sound like he was ravenous. Or joking. Fitz glanced up, looking at empty air.

“On your left, actually,” Dresden said, sounding amused. Fitz looked the other way, and felt immediately ridiculous when there wasstilll nothing there. 

“You really leaving?” He asked. “Got your...unfinished business done, or whatever?”

Dresden made a rude noise. Apparently that was something ghosts could do. Good to know.

“Something like that. Thought I’d see how you were doing, before I wander off into the light.”

“Wait, is there really a light?”

“Figure of speech,” Dresden said. “I actually have a really impatient angel.”

Fitz raised his eyebrows at the empty air. “You’re making an angel wait on you? Badass, man.”

“Hey. No swearing on the Carpenter’s roof.”

“That—that’s not even swearing, man.”

“Tell that to Charity Carpenter.”

There’s a space of silence. It’s entirely possible that Dresden’s already gone. He said his last words, checked up on the charity case. Fitz shifts his shoulders again, and speaks anyway.

“Yeah, they’re not gonna have to worry about me much longer anyway.”

He almost jumps again when Dresden replies.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

What the hell did Dresden think it meant?

“I can’t keep hanging around here,” Fitz tells him. “Gotta shift for myself, you know? These people are nice, and all, just...” he stopped, realizing that the whole of that sentence might not be something to have hanging out in the open.

“Just what?”

Aw, hell. He’s talking to a ghost.

“Just, they’re a little too nice.”

“They’re not secretly axe murderers,” Harry Dresden snapped, sounding offended. “Nobody’s perfect, but you can trust these people. The worst they’re gonna do is overfeed you.”

“I’m not scared of them,” Fitz snapped back, even though the axe murderers thing had actually run through his head once or twice. He’d never been in a house where everyone smiled so much. It was almost creepy, if it wasn’t so painfully obvious how genuine it was. “I mean they’re too good, okay? For me.”

Silence again. He shifted, the snowmelt of the roof beginning to soak into his jeans, which was gonna be fun to explain. He still didn’t need the jacket, though. He could just wrap his arms a little tighter around his chest, and the weather would feel downright balmy.

“You’re gonna have to explain that one to me.”

“Don’t you have an appointment to get to?”

“Uriel’s been waiting this long, he can wait a little longer. What is it that makes you so bad that you can’t even be around people who are halfway decent to you?”

If Fitz had hackles, that question would have raised them. There’s a lot in life that he’s ashamed of. Moments in time that he can’t take back, actions that scream coward and idiot and bully. All honestly come by, straight from a father whose idea of a present was a new black eye. He looks more like the man every day, and hates it. Anyone with half a shred of sense should take one look at his face and know to hate it too.

But that’s not something you say out loud, and it’s not what drove him out here tonight, either.

It was a glance at the paper that did that. A headline that had started his hands shaking as he flipped to the obituaries, to stare at a pair of side-by-side photographs in black and white.

“I wasn’t even trying to hurt anybody,” he says, voice breaking, which is—okay, that’s embarrassing, sitting here crying at a ghost, but he can’t seem to stop, now. “And I—I killed them. That was all on me. They were alive, and asleep, and I just—“ he has to take a breath to keep his chest from caving in, and realizes that he’s saying far more than he wanted to. Dresden doesn’t need to know. He doesn’t care. He focuses on breathing, on stopping the waterworks before Dresden can sneer at them.

“Ah, kid,” the voice says. Soft, not at all like the vice that dragged him halfway around the city when he was starved and scared with threats of sending a death squad after his crew. A lot more like the voice that had come to him when he was hiding away in a corner and waiting to die, telling him to get up, and fight, and win. “Ah, kid.”

Dresden doesn’t say anything else, but Fitz thinks he’s still there, silent, waiting for Fitz to get his breathing back under control. He’s glad the wizard doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing to say, really. Two people are dead and it’s Fitz’s fault he’s getting treated like he’s some innocent kid, when he’s not. He knew what he was doing—or he would have, if he’d stopped to think. He knew people were gonna get hurt, and he cared about his own skin more.

“It’s never all your fault,” Dresden says, eventually.

“Like hell it’s not,” Fitz snaps back, swiping the stupid tears off his eyes. He’s not in the mood for platitudes, of half-measures, or pretending that he’s everyone else’s puppet. He’s not and he never has been, and what he’s done is on his head and no one else’s.

“Who spit in your bean curd this morning?” Dresden asks. “I’m not saying you’re some lily-white innocent, okay? I’m just saying that maybe, just maybe, you don’t have to wallow in all the crap you’ve done for the rest of your life. That’s not gonna do you any good. It won’t heal anything, or bring those people back to life, of help your crew. You can be guilty and let that define you, or you can be guilty and also be alive. There’s a hell of a lot of good in you. My advice? Don’t let it go to waste by telling yourself you can’t be anything better.”

The cuts on his hands are growing gummy, scabbing over again, and the blood he smeared around is already dry, flaking off into the melting snow. Fitz frowns at the roof, wondering why Dresden sounds almost exactly like Mrs. Carpenter, insisting he wears the coat. You don’t have to be cold anymore.

He should have taken it with him out here. It’s cold, spring thaw or no spring thaw.

He looks up into the air again, for once not feeling like a crazy person.

“That something you have to tell yourself a lot?”

There’s a pause.

“Being wise is one of the perks of being dead.”

It’s probably supposed to be a joke, but it comes out too flat for one. It occurs to Fitz that everything Dresden said is about moving forward, learning, trying to make up for what he’s done. All things that you can’t do, when you’re already at the end of the line.

“They tell you where you’re going?” He asked. “After... _after_?”

“Nope. Apparently, it’s a big secret. I think they’re just trying to prolong the suspense.”

There’s not much to say to that, either.

“I’ll stay,” he says, eventually. “Can’t promise they’re gonna want me around much longer, but I’ll...I’ll do better, okay? I’ll try.”

The sudden chill in his shoulder is too brief and localized to be a breeze. It’s like an ice statue put a hand on his shoulder and snatched it away again.

“I’m glad, Fitz. I—I gotta go, okay? This was kinda my last stop. But you’re gonna do great, trust me.”

“Um. Thanks. Bye,” Fitz says.

“Bye.”

There’s no change to the world around him, but the quiet has a note of finality to it now. Fitz’s jeans are soaked through with melted snow and the early-spring breeze is still too cold not to shiver against. He thinks of the hand on his shoulder, colder than the breeze, and the warm house with its warm bed just behind him, and the coat stuffed behind the mattress. He still doesn’t want to go back, but he’s made a promise now, and it’s one he intends to keep. In just one more minute.

_You’re gonna do great. Trust me._

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! :)


End file.
